Western Goals Foundation

The Western Goals Foundation was a private intelligence dissemination network active on the right.

After the Watergate and COINTELPRO scandals of the early 1970s, several laws were passed to restrict police intellligence gathering within political organizations. The laws tried to make it neccessary to demonstrate that a criminal act was likely to be uncovered by any intelligence gathering proposed. Many files on radicals, collected for decades, were ordered destroyed. The unintended effect of the laws was to privatize the files in the hands of 'retired' intelligence officers and their most trusted, dedicated operatives.

Many of these people, like John Rees and Congressman Larry McDonald, were members of the World Anti-Communist League, the John Birch Society, and similar organizations. These two men joined forces with Major General John Singlaub to form the Western Goals Foundation in 1981.

It also founded an offshoot, Western Goals (UK) which was briefly influential in British Conservative politics.

Contributors have included: Taylor Caldwell, Mrs. Walter Brennan, Nelson Bunker Hunt, Roger Milliken/Deering-Milliken Corp, and the Chance, Grede, and Ada Hearne foundations. Corporate funders include Springdale and Cherokee Mills, Deering-Milliken Research Corporation, Knott's Berry Farm, and the Henry Regnery Company. (Note: In an interview shortly before he died, McDonald acknowledged that Nelson Bunker Hunt had been one of Western Goals' "major contributors." He refused to confirm or deny other contributors, however. He did say that ten contributors gave $20,000 or more per year.)

John Singlaub, Daniel Graham, and Mildred Jefferson, are members of the national policy board of the American Freedom Coalition, a political organization with extensive ties to the Unification Church. Singlaub, Graham, and Jefferson are/were members of the board of governors of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive policy-oriented umbrella organization for the rightwing in the United States. Other Western Goals members who are/were on the Council's board of governors include: Sherman Unkefer, Hans Sennholz, and Robert Stoddard. The group's financial backer Nelson Bunker Hunt is on CNP's board too, as was Larry McDonald.

The following individuals were associated with the organization at some point prior to its collapse: Carl Channell (dir). Linda Catoe Guell (exec dir). Former Advisory Board Members: Hon. Jean Ashbrook, Mrs. Walter Brennan, Taylor Caldwell, Roy M. Cohn (deceased), Rep. Philip M. Crane, Gen. Raymond G. Davis, Henry Hazlitt, Mildred F. Jefferson, Anthony Kubek, Rep. Bob Livingston, Harold P. McDonald, Jr., Roger Milliken, Adm. Thomas Moorer, E. A. Morris, Vice Adm. Lloyd M. Mustin, Gen. George S. Patton, Hans Sennholz, Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, Dan Smoot, Robert Stoddard, Rep. Bob Stump, Sen. Steve Symms, Helen Marie Taylor, Dr. Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner. Sherman Unkefer. John and Louise Rees. Gen. Lewis Walt, Helen White.

Related Books

 * Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, Inside the League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League (New York, NY: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1986).

Related Sourcewatch articles

 * Linda Guell
 * Carl Channell
 * Talk:Chip Berlet